The photographs from the series Ready Made Still Lifes were made in Brooklyn. The author took the motifs literally from the street or residential buildings of the New York (sub)urban area. The depicted buildings share a banal fact: they all have plastic flower arrangements functioning as a decorative element on their windowsills. The series is composed of many pairs of photographs, placed in contrasting juxtaposition. The smallest photograph of each pair, a drily descriptive photograph made in the simple snapshot technique, represents scenes from daily street life with residential buildings or various shops, while the other is a cut-out of that same motif, a close-up of the detail of artificial flowers on windowsills, still life that, despite being shot with a simple compact camera in the style of the amateur photography, functions as formally stylized, pictorial, decorative, studio-produced. From the photographs, not even from that half that represents the street with houses, it is not possible to tell clearly what kind of community lives in the photographed district of the otherwise extremely culturally heterogeneous Brooklyn. The common denominator – whether ethical, religious or economic – of the residents cannot be defined. However, it is evident that the author has not taken on the position of photographer-ethnographer, as it is symptomatic of contemporary documentary photography. Rather, he focused his attention elsewhere.In this project, Bojan Radovič deals with the phenomenon of photography at the level that appears to be one of the most neuralgic in today’s understanding of photography as artistic practice: he explores the status of a work of art and its value, while simultaneously questioning the traditions of minimalism, conceptualism and avantgardism in photography.High culture in the time of late capitalism is subject to a uniform semantic regime of formalism. Formalism is a neutralizing, universalistic system of reading, the only one able to bring all photographs of this world in one space, framing and selling them. In this context, photography becomes a mere commodified fetish, a privileged object of experts, reaching the ultimate semantic poverty (if this last has not been haunting it since ever). Ready Made Still Lifes are subject to ‘amateurization’ as Jeff Wall calls the explicit reductive methodology of photography. This last is most pronounced in the practice of Photo-conceptualism in which the photograph calls for its own withdrawal from the framework of art-photography through the agency, performance of the artist who is, as the so-called non-artist, nevertheless “compelled” to take photographs. However, these photographs lose the status of Image before the eyes of the audience – they seem wearisome and unimportant, yet only as such can they achieve the intellectual claims for the reductivism of Conceptual art. In terms of methodology, Radovič’s photographs meet the criteria of Photo-conceptualism, reevaluating and questioning it at the same time by way of estheticism and a pronounced sensuality of the motif. The strained relationship between art and consumable goods is, perhaps, manifested most clearly in the concept of the readymade which problematizes the esthetical value of a work of art. Readymade raises the question as of what is and what is not to be regarded art, alluding to the fact that in the context of capitalist society this value depends on the autonomy of the object, on its exclusion from the everyday world. Viewed retrospectively, this object has provoked two opposite readings of value. On the one hand, the work of art is defined as a commodity determined by the exchange value, and on the other, it can be understood as an object fit for use, therefore an object with a use value. This conflict of different forms of value is central to the critical ambiguity that readymade incites to think about with regard to the status of a work of art in the time of late capitalism.The capitalist exchange of goods is based on equality/equivalence. However, this exchange can be challenged, at least symbolically, in two ways. Firstly, by referring to a number of exchanges based on a different principle – on the ambivalence of the exchange of presents rather than on the equivalence of exchange of goods and, secondly, by provoking the economy of equivalence from the inside, through recoding of its commodity signs. One aspect of this strategy is the appropriation of signs of mass culture and is manifest in the practices of alternative culture that has played for a long time with signs pertaining to class, ethnicity, gender. Such a game is as well used in the art of appropriation which represents these signs differently, yet in the majority of cases mostly in contrast with the principles of high art. The second approach that can be detected in Radovič’s photographs of flower arrangements somehow alienates the commodification so as to evoke the ambivalence of surrealistic objects. The lost aura of a work of art is replaced by a false, artificial aura of a commodity (plastic flowers) – a paradoxical gesture, considering that it was precisely commodification that destroyed the artistic aura. The readymade has turned from a means of demystification of art to a mechanism of reinstatement of art. As a result, readymade is subverted, and commodity has taken the place of “allegorical mode of seeing”.The disavowal of traditional esthetics of a picture – in the name of amateurism, for example – must be seen as a claim to a new level of pictorial consciousness. Thus, artistically relevant photography is compelled to be both anti-esthetic and esthetically significant at one and the same time. Radovič’s depictions of plastic flowers point to the fact that it is the content of the avant-garde claims that is central in creating the demand for an estheticism which was, paradoxically, the object of critique by that same avant-garde.Recently, Radovič has been involved in the deconstruction of “art-photography”, digressing from the dominant formalistic paradigm of photography and unveiling its commodified, fe-tishistic inner nature. For this reason, Radovič’s photographs from the series Ready Made Stil Lifes can be defined as an implicit parodic critique of the concept of “artistic photography” as well as a critique of his own legitimacy.